How the South Won the Civil War

With this beautifully written book, prominent US historian Heather Cox Richardson offers valuable insights to historians and general readers about the tenacity of oligarchy in American politics since the seventeenth century. For some, American ‘equality’ has always been predicated on hierarchy. Richardson’s analytical scope is stunning; she proves history’s relevance to American politics and demonstrates interconnections between the US South and its West. The persistence of elite white male rule in the post-emancipation South is a familiar story, but less familiar is how its supporting ideologies took root elsewhere in the nation. Richardson highlights long-standing clashes between an orientation toward ‘equality and self-determination,’ and one toward a hierarchy with self-described ‘deserving’ men at its pinnacle (pp. xiv–xv). Excluding people deemed inferior by white male elites was fundamental to America politics. The assumption that a ‘permanent underclass’ was just and inevitable lay below colonial labour regimes, reaching its depths with hereditary

Democracy · Elite · Emancipation · Ideology · New Deal · Oligarchy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Gender Studies · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society